Karma systems
can work but you have to tread lightly! For example /.'s karma system is all messed up because (from what I can tell) only their mods can give karma, every time I made a useful post I had 10 year olds insulting me, and then the mods would give me negative karma not only for posts defending myself (with tact) but on the original contribution post! So I boycott their lame (obvious) fan-boy site.
The correct way to implement any sort of karma system is as much as I hate their site (and the default icons) ...well I can't remember the name of it...but even when you check Google cache the "accepted answer" is blocked by "give us money" essentially...
but the O.P. should be able to at
least note once who's post was helpful to solve the original question.
Then there is the issue of multiple questions
per thread! So what I would propose is to let them eat pie! If it's a simple straightforward question/answer thread the whole pie can go to one person. If you're working on learning PHP Classes to understand OOP (what I did recently) I could say for example well Everah helped big on one part but since it's an obtuse topic and Everah can't spend three hours on a single reply. So I'd give Everah a piece of the pie.
The only issue is having to figure out how many pieces of the pie need to exist in the first place. We could in that instance make it completely dynamic. A thread with four out of seven questions answered could have an icon that shows four out of seven pieces of a pie in an image showing it's general complexity and how much has been answered. This might be overkill and so you could resort to simply using two halves to represent completely answered, half answered, and not answered while still giving a piece to every useful answer.
The only gray area would be if someone attempts to help out though even though they spent half an hour working on the post they don't get a piece of the pie. In which case it might be better to keep the pie hidden initially until the question has been fully answered.
Gah, well this went on way longer then I wanted...it might not even be a reasonable approach. Anyway /. sucks! Go devnetwork!
